


Anyone's Ghost

by Captain_Loki



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Hallucinations, M/M, Nightmares, Survivor Guilt, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captain_Loki/pseuds/Captain_Loki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Scott is the first to tell him it’s not his fault, which Stiles knows rationally even if his logic takes a backseat to the guilt and shame and sick twisted wrenching of his heart when he remembers Derek’s eyes flashing red before they go dark. </i>
</p><p> </p><p>Derek dies and Stiles has nightmares. Derek dies and Stiles blames himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anyone's Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the is [prompt](http://tylerposeysjawline.tumblr.com/post/38497947339/so-i-need-a-fic-where-derek-dies-i-dont-really)
> 
> If there is something I should add to the tags, lemme know :D

 

After the first twenty four hours he’s tired but he’s fine. Stiles has pulled all nighters before, and he’s no stranger to the feeling of caffeine induced insomnia. He busies himself with schoolwork and tries to forget.

After the first forty-eight hours he’s groggy and loopy and can’t stand without shaking his head to rid himself of the fatigue descending on him like a dark fog. He’d eat to save energy but food tastes stale, bland, and bitter, and makes his stomach turn and writhe. So he stops.

After the first seventy-two hours he passes out behind the wheel and narrowly avoids wrapping his jeep around a tree just down the street from the high school.

Scott isn’t with him, but he hears about it. May have heard it, anyway, while out on the field at lacrosse practice. Stiles stopped going pretty much right after _It_ happened.

 

 

They bury him beside his sister, beneath a coiled rope and a gathering of wolfsbane. Peter is silent through the whole thing, and Stiles doesn’t suspect there’s much left of the uncle Derek knew, but the look he gives Stiles is filled with regret and a sadness that eats at him like acid.

Scott becomes Alpha and the pack falls in line like they never managed to do for Derek, and it feels like the universe’s sick joke that it brings everyone closer together.

Except Stiles.

Stiles who avoids people when it’s too overwhelming to be around them, and who loathes the quiet of solitude even more than the chattering bustle of people moving and living.

He expected the nightmares, is unsurprised the first night he wakes drenched in a cold sweat with his heart pounding out of his chest and fresh tears spilling across his face. He doesn’t expect how long they last, how vivid they become, how visceral they are, how gutted he feels each and every night he wakes with his hand stretched out in the dark in front of him, fingers grasping over empty air where Derek’s hand stood waiting just moments before, poised, and ready, and desperate.

Scott is the first to tell him it’s not his fault, which Stiles knows rationally even if his logic takes a backseat to the guilt and shame and sick twisted wrenching of his heart when he remembers Derek’s eyes flashing red before they go dark. He’s seen death before, and Death feels like an entity that stands poised beside him, waiting, following Stiles like he’s the flashing neon vacancy sign on a cheap motel ready and open for business.

He doesn’t need to be asleep to hear his name torn from Derek’s mouth, gurgled from the blood thick on his tongue. When he’s asleep Stiles can scent the iron in it, can feel it running wet along his hands and coating his palms, can smell the ozone in the air, and the sharp acrid scent of burning, like rubber, where the remnants of magic start to fade.

Stiles falls asleep unwillingly after five days. He throws up viciously before he passes out on the cold, unforgiving tile of his bathroom. His dream is blurred at the edges and the sound rushes past him hazy and distorted.

 _His vision tunnels to Derek and the way he’s slumping towards the ground._ “ _Derek!” It’s his voice but it doesn’t feel like he’s speaking and he’s hung somewhere between witness and participant, like he could float outside his body at any moment, this tether he has to himself intangible and ethereal. His hands and feet feel numb._

_“HEAL!” His scream is rent and wracked on a desperate sob and he thinks sardonically of all the lame dog jokes. He has about a hundred of them he hasn’t used yet, waiting for a set up that won’t come and a punch line untold and he shakes so hard he feels like he might burst apart._

_“He won’t.” And the voice comes out in a high laugh and ends with a cackle, and the pack comes but it’s too late. Always too late and Derek bleeds out on his favorite jeans and the t-shirt Derek gave Stiles and pretended like he’d just bought the wrong size of. It’s still hung carefully in the back of Stiles’ closet beside the sweater his mother wore ragged, the one with the pink stripes and the tea stain on the sleeve from when Stiles climbed ungracefully into her lap one lazy Sunday afternoon._

Stiles wakes, still and silent, and the light above the vanity flickers and dies.

 

And it doesn’t take long for his father to notice, even if he doesn’t know why, exactly. He’s not stupid and Stiles knows he’s figured out more than he’s let on over the past two years and he says one night, standing quiet in the door to Stiles’ room, “haven’t seen Hale around, lately.”

Stiles just shrugs and doesn’t meet his eyes but when his father leaves he drinks two _monsters_ and nearly ODs on aderall.

 

He stops doing his homework, and he stops going to class, and he doesn’t show up for detention, or bother to call in sick to the grocery store he started working at just before junior year. Scott brings him all of his favorite foods and the entire series of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ on DVD and about 16 gigs of his favorite kind of porn which means he’s gone slumming through gay porn sites for him.

There’s a flutter in his chest and he wants to smile but the muscles in his face feel unused and just as tired as he is, so instead he cries. It takes only a fraction of a second for Scott to start too, and he drops his backpack on Stiles’ floor and pulls him close. Stiles’ hands fist in Scott’s hoodie and he gets tears and snot on his shoulder where he buries his head to muffle the sounds of his sobs.

“ _Stiles_ ,” Scott’s voice is wrecked and broken and he clings to Stiles tightly, like he’s trying to absorb him, but his wolf powers don’t work on emotional hurt and Stiles just feels empty and defeated.

“Stiles, it wasn’t your fault, _please_ ,” Scott begs, and he shakes Stiles lightly, sad and angry.

“I should have gone when he asked. He was trying to protect me, if I’d have gone—“ Stiles says, sniffling, wiping at the tears and pulling away, pleading with Scott.

“Then he would have died alone!” Scott says, and it stings. Stiles pushes away and shakes his head. “This isn’t your fault Stiles, and trying to find a way to make it your fault is killing you. You couldn’t do _anything_. _Please_.” Scott reaches for him but Stiles shrugs his hand away and stares out his window.

“Please talk to me,” Scott whispers. Stiles doesn’t answer him, but he shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head.

“I have nothing to say.”

“You need to sleep, I know you haven’t in days,” and Stiles laughs sardonically, he can’t remember the last time he slept for more than the span of a single nightmare. “You should eat.”

“No.”

“Let someone help you. Talk to someone, _anyone_.”

“And say what?” Stiles chokes, spinning around. “I didn’t even _like_ him!” Stiles laughs, and it sounds harsh and hollow, so disgustingly untrue.

“You loved him.”

Stiles punches him in the face, it doesn’t make him feel better, and his hand throbs and Scott’s dripping blood onto his carpet and he knows that Scott just _let_ him, and he’s shaking his head and biting back a wave of fresh tears.

“Fuck you,” he says without feeling, without any kind of malice or bite, because he can’t deal with that. Not now, not ever. He turns back around and doesn’t say anything until Scott leaves, until he hears the front door shut softly and he whispers,

“I’m sorry.” He knows Scott, standing in his driveway, can hear him.

 

“Your friends are trying to protect you,” Derek says. He’s wiping blood off his lip and staring forlornly down at his ruined t-shirt.

“I know,” Stiles tells him, staring up at his ceiling and watching the dying sun make shadows dance along his darkening bedroom.

“It was definitely your fault,” Derek states.

“I’m not arguing that point,” Stiles reasons, folding his hands across his stomach.

“I’m just saying,” Derek offers and he sits on the bed beside him. The first time Derek came to him, he was only mildly surprised to find that he was in fact awake. It’s been three days and Derek comes with more frequency and he doesn’t bat an eye at the hallucination.

He’s not so far gone not to know what this is.

“I was trying to look after you, which I wouldn’t have had to do if you weren’t so fucking stubborn. If you’d have gone?” Derek starts, “I wouldn’t have been distracted. They can pretend all they want, but we both know I’m dead and it’s your fault.”

“Play a different tune, I’m sick of this one.”

“I’m sick of being dead.”

 

It’s when his mom shows up that Stiles loses it, that he knows he’s lost it far before this. She comes to him, standing at the foot of his bed and looking skeletal and ghostly and he sits up in horror and she screams as her face twists into an elongated grimace, like a banshee or a succubus he’s seen pictures of in Derek’s old books.

She asks him in a voice like blades over bone why everything he loves dies, and she calls him poison as he screams and scrambles off his bed and cowers against the wall and scratches at his arms and face, he slams his head against the wall and blacks out.

 

He spends three weeks in an institution, and he takes his pills and lies to his therapists and when he’s released he pretends. He sleeps and he eats and the nightmares are still there but with the cocktail he’s dosed with the hallucinations slow and eventually stop, and he starts to feel a little more human.

Isaac sits with him sometimes and Erica tries but she always has to leave to cry and Boyd avoids him and Scott barely leaves his side.

 

Two months after Derek dies Stiles sits atop his grave and tells him what he couldn’t when he was alive. He tells him that he’s sorry and he stutters over the words and laughs harshly at himself because this shouldn’t be so hard, Derek isn’t even here anymore.

“I loved you. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you died not knowing how much…” Stiles chokes on the sob and shakes his head, looking down at the ground beneath him.

“I knew.” Stiles jumps and turns, staring at Derek sat beside him, clean shaven, and clothes neat and free of blood.

“You’re not real,” Stiles says, heart rate slowly returning to normal. “Kinda takes away the validity of anything you might have to say.”

The Derek beside him shrugs. “Maybe. But it doesn’t make it any less true.” Stiles shakes his head.

“Doesn’t matter, anyway.”

“Yeah it does,” Derek is looking at him like he’s stupid. He’s missed that look so much it twists at his insides. “I knew. And _you_ know that I loved you too. That I always did, even when we hated each other, would have been wrong to call it love then, I guess, but it was a belligerent sort of affection that I tried for two years to fight.”

Stiles shakes his head, he doesn’t want to hear this, _can’t_ hear this. It’s not real.

“I died to save you, and I’d do it again, Stiles. In a heartbeat.”

“You don’t have one.”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Derek actually sighs and Stiles laughs.

“An exasperated hallucination, that’s great. I can’t even do this properly. You should get naked, that’d cheer me up.” Derek is looking at him with open affection and Stiles has to look away, flushing hot under his gaze and tears starting to prickle at his eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Derek.”

“I’m not.” Stiles shakes his head.

“Don’t. Don’t be all, I’m with Laura now. Don’t feed me that sappy Halmark bullshit.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Good.”

“Good.” They sit in silence for a long stretch of time, until the sun starts to dip towards the horizon and Stiles grows cold.  

“I’m going to go now, Stiles,” Derek tells him. Stiles sighs and waves him off.

“Cool.”

“Stiles…” Stiles avoids his gaze, but he looks up when he feels the pressure of a hand against his cheek and he turns, shocked. Derek is leaning forward, lips capturing his own in a soft, gentle press. The kiss is chaste, and over too soon and Stiles and pulls back, alarmed, afraid, and confused. Derek smiles at him once, and it’s open and real in a way that Stiles has never really seen on his face and then he’s gone.

Stiles goes home and he sleeps, but the nightmares feel old and grainy, detached and unreal, and when he wakes he pulls the leather jacket out from beneath his bed and tugs it on with hands that only tremble slightly, and he lies staring at the ceiling until his alarm blares angrily at him and the sun spills bright through the open blinds and he thinks, maybe today, he’ll try.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on [tumblr](http://captain-snark.tumblr.com) or don't. Do what you want.


End file.
